Global Payments breach of 1.5m credit cards

Around 1.5 million credit card details were potentially stolen by hackers according to an announcement by the third-party payment processing firm at the centre of one of large breach in credit card security.

Despite the fact that Global Payment's chief Paul Garcia described the breach as 'contained' in a call to investors, credit card giant Visa moved to drop the firm as an approved third party payment processor.

Garcia said that so-called "track one" data, consisting of card holder names, addresses and other personal information, were not part of the stolen cards. He also claimed that the massive data breach has resulted in "no known" incidences of credit card fraud.

The breach has also triggered increased scrutiny of US laws relating to security breach notification rules in the US, currently dictated on a state-by-state basis.

Global Payments maintain that the stolen credit cards were confined to the payment processor's North American operations. The company will now need to satisfy credit card giant Visa that the firm has improved security before being listed as Visa processor once again.

"These are fiends, these are bad guys, these are guys who are working day and night to hurt all of us," Garcia said.

Krebs on Security, the security blogger that first broke the story of the breach, said that it was "unclear whether there are additional accounts beyond these 1.5 million that were exposed by the breach."